I'm in the car with the Ex on the way to Jazz Alley and "Ridin' Solo" comes on. I laugh.
"Is this your theme song right now?"
He laughs too. "It's been played a few times. Maybe more than a few times. And it's made the karaoke rotation maybe a few times."
"Wow, I'm famous!"
"Sort of. There's another word with 'famous' in it, have you heard of that word?"
"Nope. No idea what word you're talking about. Never been applied to me before, either."
Roommate and I are locals, and have lived in Seattle proper for years, on and off, and currently live eleven blocks from Pike Place Market, which we have pretty much memorized, and yet here we are at Information, trying to find a tobacco store.
The Information Ladies don't know one off the top of their heads, so they are looking at a map to help us. I study the map outside. Roommate has been up since 2 am (not a typo) and is getting a little punchy and I'm worried she's going to cause the Information Ladies serious psychological damage. There are several maps of Pike Place Market, all drawn poorly, none with any relation to each other.
"This map is color coded according to building," I say to Roommate, around the corner talking to the ladies. "Apparently there's one in the Stewart Building."
"That's what they just said," she said, frustrated, "but who knew the buildings had NAMES? I just need them to tell me what it's by." (Pop quiz: can you name ANY of the Pike Place Market buildings?)
We finally agree that the tobacco store is probably by the Original Starbucks. We set off.
We walk in frustrated silence for several minutes, pushing our way through the hordes of tourists and Christmas dawdlers. Both of us agree that making maps that only reference building names is probably not the best way to go.
"Just proof that in the Information Age, simply having a lot of information is NOT the same thing as knowing anything useful," I said, rather dryly.
We found the tobacco store.
Okay, I have spent some time in Asian countries and third world countries and I rarely get overwhelmed, by ANYTHING, but I am in Seoul, and I just flat out escaped into a Starbucks. Let me tell you how rare that is for me. This may actually be a first.
Do not go into Namnaimun Market without valium.
There are things I actually want to buy, and every time I reach for my wallet I become paralysed by indecision and then I have to sit down, and there's no place to sit and I'm surrounded by 50,000 Koreans and everyone's pushing and shoving and no one loves me and I'm freezing and I have cramps and my roommate is cleaning the apartment and going on ACTUAL DATES and I am weirded out, man, and I need out NEED OUT I'M GOING TO LOSE MY MIND OMG A STARBUCKS.
Yeah. That's kind of how it was.
And I'm really pretty okay with it.
In honor of the demise of that relationship, I have an excellent text that I once typed, very drunk, to the most recent ex:
"Wowm jm. Uh noy sure how phrase the fact that I'm too dino to khalsa a penitent."
No, I didn't send it.
